by Jodi Picoult
• • •
In 1999, on the day I first learned of the cancer bleaching the life out of my mother, I’d driven blindly through the bush trying to outrun the news. To my shock, I’d found five elephant carcasses with their trunks cut away—and one very devastated, very frightened calf.
Her trunk was limp, her ears translucent. She could not have been more than three weeks old. But I had not known how to care for her, and her story did not end happily.
Neither did my mother’s. I took a six-month leave of absence from my postdoctoral research to be with her until she passed away. When I returned to Botswana, I was all alone in the world, and threw myself into my work to avoid my grief—only to realize that these great, gracious elephants treated death so matter-of-factly. They did not find themselves thinking in circles: wondering why I had not called home on Mother’s Day; questioning why I had always argued with my mother, instead of telling her how much I modeled myself on her self-sufficiency; proclaiming I was too busy with my work or too broke to fly home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, my birthday. Those spiraling thoughts were killing me, each turn of the screw sinking me into a quicksand of guilt. Almost by accident, I began to study the grief of elephants. I told myself all sorts of excuses about why this was of visceral academic importance. But really, all I wanted to do was learn from the animals, which made it look so easy.
When I came back to Africa to heal from the second loss of my life, it was during a time when poaching was on the rise. The killers had gotten smarter. Where they used to shoot the oldest matriarchs and bulls with the biggest tusks, they now randomly targeted a youngster, knowing that would make the herd bunch together in defense, which of course made it easier for poachers to kill en masse. For a long time no one wanted to admit that the elephants in South Africa were at risk again, but they were. Elephants in bordering Mozambique were being poached heavily, and the orphaned calves ran terrified back into the Kruger.
It was one of those calves that I found while I was hiding in South Africa. Her mother, a victim of poaching, had been shot in the shoulder and collapsed with a festering wound. The calf, which refused to leave her mother’s side, was surviving by drinking her urine. I knew as soon as I found them in the bush that the mother would have to be euthanized. I knew, too, this would lead to the death of her daughter.
I wasn’t about to let that happen again.
I set up my rescue center in Phalaborwa, South Africa, modeling it on Dame Daphne Sheldrick’s elephant orphanage in Nairobi. The philosophy is very basic, actually: When an elephant calf loses its family, you must provide a new one. Human keepers stay with the babies around the clock, offering bottles and affection and love, sleeping next to them at night. The keepers are rotated, so that no elephant becomes too attached to one person. I learned the hard way that if a calf forms too tight an attachment to one human, it can sink into depression if that caregiver takes even a day or two of vacation; the grief of that loss can even lead to death.
The caregivers never strike their charges, not even if they are acting out. A reprimand is usually enough; these babies so badly want to please their caregivers. Elephants remember everything, though, so it is important to always provide a little extra warmth later, lest the elephant think that it has been punished not for being naughty but because it is unlovable.
We feed the babies specially formulated milk, but also cooked oatmeal after five months—much like you’d introduce a human baby to solids. We supplement coconut oil to provide the fat content they would have had from their mothers’ breast milk. We measure their progress by looking at their cheeks, which—like those of human infants—should be chubby. By age two, they are transferred to a new facility, one with slightly older elephants. Some of the caregivers will have rotated through the nursery, so that the newly transferred elephants recognize them. They recognize, too, their former companions who have already graduated from the nursery. The caregivers now sleep apart from the elephants, but within hearing range of the barn. Every day they lead the elephants out into the Kruger to be introduced to natural herds. The older elephants in the facility jostle to see who should act as matriarch. They take the new babies under their wings, with each female adopting her own calf to pretend-mother. The babies march out first, followed by the slightly older elephants. Eventually, they will integrate with a wild herd.
On a few occasions, we have even had elephants that are now wild return for help—once, when a young mother’s milk dried up and she was in danger of losing her baby; and again when a nine-year-old bull got its leg caught in snare wire. They do not trust all humans indiscriminately, because they know firsthand the devastation people can cause. But they apparently don’t judge all of us by those few, either.
The locals started to call me Ms. Ali—short for Miss Alice. And eventually, that became the name of the facility: If an elephant calf is found, bring it to Msali. If I do my job right, then these orphaned elephants eventually walk away, happily connected to a wild herd in the Kruger, where they belong. After all, we raise our own children to live without us, one day.
It’s when they leave us too soon that nothing makes sense.
VIRGIL
Do you remember when you were a kid and you thought that clouds must feel like cotton, and then one day you learned that they are actually made up of droplets of water? That if you tried to stretch out on one and take a nap, you—you would just hurtle through it and smash on the ground?
First, I drop the tooth.
Except I don’t, really. Because dropping it would suggest that I had been holding on to it, and it’s more like there’s no resistance to my hand anymore, so that the tooth just sinks through and pings on the floor. I look up, completely freaked out, and grab for the closest thing to me, which happens to be Tallulah.
My hand swipes right through her, and her body dissipates and curls as if it is made of smoke.
The same thing is happening to Jenna. She flickers in and out, her face twisted in fear. I try to call out her name, but it sounds like I’m at the bottom of a well.
Out of nowhere, I remember the long line of people at the airport who didn’t react when I cut ahead, the ticket agent who took me aside and said, You don’t belong here.
I remember the half dozen waitresses at the diner who walked obliviously past me and Jenna, until finally one bothered to notice. Was it just that the others couldn’t see us?
I think of Abby, my landlady, dressed like she’s stepped out of a Prohibition rally, which I now realize she probably did. I think of Ralph in the evidence room, who was old enough to be a fossil back when I was on the job. Tallulah, the waitress, the ticket agent, Abby, Ralph—all of these people, they were like me. In this world, but not of it.
And I remember the crash. The tears that were on my face, and the Eric Clapton song on the radio, and the way I pushed my foot down on the accelerator as I rounded the tight curve. I had stiffened my arms so that I wouldn’t be a coward and jerk the car to safety, and at the last minute, I reached down and unbuckled my seat belt. The moment of impact was still a shock, even though I was expecting it—glass from the windshield raining over my face, the steering wheel column boring into my chest, my body being thrown. For one glorious, silent second, I flew.
On the long ride home from Tennessee, I had asked Serenity what she thought it felt like to die.
She thought for a second. How do you fall asleep?
What do you mean? I said. It just happens.
Right. You’re awake, and then you drift for a moment, and then you’re out like a light. Physically, you relax. Your mouth goes slack. Your heart rate slows down. You detach from the third dimension. There’s some level of awareness, but for the most part, it’s like you’re in another zone. Suspended animation.
Now, I have something to add to that. When you’re asleep, you think there’s a whole other world that feels completely real while you are dreaming it.
Serenity.
I struggle to turn
around so that I can see her. But I am suddenly so light and weightless that I don’t even have to move, I just think and I’m where I need to be. I blink, and I can see her.
Unlike me, unlike Tallulah, unlike Jenna, her body has not dissipated or flickered. She is rock solid.
Serenity, I think, and her head turns.
“Virgil?” she whispers.
The last thought I have before I am gone completely is that in spite of what Serenity’s said—in spite of what I had believed—she’s not a lousy psychic. She’s a fucking great one.
ALICE
I lost two babies, you know. One whom I knew and loved, and one I never met. I knew before I ran from the hospital that I had miscarried.
Now I have more than a hundred babies who consume every waking moment of my life. I have become one of those brittle, busy people who emerge from suffering like a tornado, turning so fast that we do not even realize how much self-destruction we’re causing.
The worst part of my day is when it is over. If I could, I would be a caretaker, sleeping in the nursery with the calves. But someone needs to be the public face of Msali.
People here know I used to do research in the Tuli Block. And that I lived, for a brief while, in the States. But most people don’t connect the academic I used to be to the activist I am now. I have not been Alice Metcalf for a long time.
As far as I’m concerned, she is dead, too.
When I wake up, I am screaming.
I do not like to sleep, and if I must, I want it to be thick and dreamless. For this reason I usually work myself to the bone, and pass out for two or three hours each night. I think about Jenna every day, every moment, but I have not thought about Thomas or Gideon for a long time. Thomas, I know, is still living in an institution. And a drunken Google search one night during the rainy season revealed that Gideon joined the army, and died in Iraq when an IED went off in a crowded public square. I printed out the newspaper article that talked about the posthumous Medal of Honor he had been awarded. He was buried at Arlington. I thought if I ever went back to the States, I might visit to pay my respects.
I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, letting myself come back to this world slowly. Reality is frigid; I have to dip one toe at a time and grow accustomed to the shock before wading in further.
My gaze falls on the one remnant of my past life that I have with me in South Africa. It is a club roughly two and a half feet long, maybe eight inches wide. Made from a length of a young tree; the bark has been stripped away in random swirls and stripes. It’s quite beautiful, like a native totem, but if you stare at it long enough, you would swear that there’s a message to be decoded.
The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, which became the home for our animals, had a website that let me track their progress, and also raised awareness of the work they were doing with elephants that had suffered in captivity. About five years ago, they held a Christmas auction to raise money. An elephant who had recently died had loved to pass the time by stripping trees of their bark in the most unlikely, delicate patterns; pieces of her “artwork” were being sold as donations.
I knew right away that this was Maura. I had watched her do this very thing dozens of times, pinning the logs we gave her for playtime against the bars of the barn stall, dragging her tusks to peel away the silver birch, the crusted pine.
It wasn’t odd for the Msali Elephant Orphanage in South Africa to want to support the sanctuary’s cause. They never knew I was the woman behind the check that was mailed; or that, when I received the item along with a picture of the elephant I had known so well—R.I.P. Maura written delicately across the top—I had cried for an hour.
For the past five years, that cylinder of wood has been hanging on the wall across from my bed. But as I watch now, it falls off the wall, hits the floor, and breaks into two clean halves.
At that moment, my phone rings.
“I’m looking for Alice Metcalf,” a man says.
My hands turn to ice. “Who’s calling?”
“Detective Mills from the Boone Police Department.”
So this is it. So now everything has caught up with me. “This is Alice Metcalf,” I murmur.
“Well, ma’am, with all due respect, you are one tough person to find.”
I close my eyes, waiting to be blamed.
“Ms. Metcalf,” the detective says, “we’ve found the body of your daughter.”
SERENITY
One minute I am standing in a room at a private laboratory with three other people, and the next, I’m alone in that same room, on my hands and knees looking for a tooth that has fallen.
“Can I help you?”
I jam the tooth into my pocket and turn to find a bearded man in a white coat. I approach him hesitantly, tap him hard on the shoulder. “You’re really here.”
He recoils, rubbing his collarbone, looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. “Yes, but why are you? Who let you in?”
I am not about to tell him my suspicion: that the “person” who had let me in was an earthbound spirit, a ghost. “I’m looking for an employee named Tallulah,” I say.
His features soften. “Were you a personal friend?”
Were. I shake my head. “An acquaintance.”
“Tallulah passed away about three months ago. I guess it was a heart condition that wasn’t diagnosed? She was in the middle of training for her first half marathon.” He puts his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “I’m really sorry to have to break the news to you.”
I stumble out of the lab, passing the secretary at the front desk and a security guard and a girl sitting on the concrete wall outside making a phone call. I can’t tell who is alive and who isn’t, so I look down at the ground, refusing to make eye contact.
In my car I turn the air-conditioning on full blast and close my eyes. Virgil had been sitting right here. Jenna had been in the backseat. I had talked to them, touched them, heard them clear as a bell.
Clear as a bell. I take my cell phone out and start scrolling until I get to the list of recent calls. Jenna’s number should be there, from when she rang me in Tennessee, scared and alone. But then again, spirits manipulate energy all the time. The doorbell rings when no one is there; a printer goes on the fritz; lights flicker when there’s no storm.
I hit Redial, and get a recording. The number is out of service.
This just can’t be what I think it is. It can’t, I realize, because plenty of people saw me in public with Virgil and Jenna.
I turn the ignition and scream out of the parking lot, driving back to the diner where the rude waitress had serviced our table this morning. When I walk into the building, a bell jangles overhead; on the jukebox, Chrissie Hynde is singing about brass in her pocket. I crane my neck over the high red leather booths, looking for the woman who had taken our order this morning.
“Hey,” I say, interrupting her as she is serving a table full of kids in soccer uniforms. “Do you remember me?”
“I never forget a three-cent tip,” she mutters.
“How many people were at my table?”
I follow her to the cash register. “Is this a trick question? You were by yourself. Even though you ordered enough to feed half the kids in Africa.”
I open up my mouth to point out that Jenna and Virgil ordered their own meals, but that’s not true. They had told me what they wanted to eat, and had each gone to the restroom.
“I was with a man in his thirties—his hair was buzzed short, and he was wearing a flannel shirt even in this heat … and a teenage girl, who had a messy red braid …”
“Look, lady,” the waitress says, reaching beneath the till to hand me a business card. “There are places you can go for help. But this isn’t one of them.”
I glance down: GRAFTON COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.
• • •
At the Boone Town Office, I sit down with a Red Bull and a stack of records from 2004: births, deaths, marriages.
I read Nevvie Ruehl’s
death certificate so many times I think I might have memorized it.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: (A) Blunt force trauma
(B) DUE TO: Trampling by elephant
Manner of death: Accidental
PLACE OF INJURY: New England Elephant Sanctuary, Boone, NH
DESCRIBE HOW INJURY OCCURRED: Unknown
Virgil’s death certificate is the one I find next. He died in early December.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: (A) Penetrating trauma to the chest
(B) DUE TO: Motor vehicle accident
Manner of death: Suicidal
Jenna Metcalf does not have a death certificate, of course, because her body was never found.
Until that tooth.
There was no mistake in the medical examiner’s report. Nevvie Ruehl was indeed the person who died at the sanctuary that night, and Alice Metcalf was the unconscious woman Virgil had brought to the hospital, who subsequently disappeared.
Following this logic, I finally know for sure why Alice Metcalf would not have communicated with me—or even Jenna, for that matter. Alice Metcalf, most likely, is still alive.
The last death certificate I look up belongs to Chad Allen, the teacher whose unattractive baby Jenna told me she’d been babysitting. “Did you know him?” the clerk says, looking over my shoulder.
“Not really,” I murmur.
“It was a real shame. Carbon monoxide poisoning. The whole family died. I was in his calculus class the year it happened.” She glances at the pile of papers on the table. “Do you need copies of these?”